Posted on 04/11/2006 5:11:24 PM PDT by LibWhacker
New research chips away at the "irreducible complexity" argument behind intelligent design.
Lehigh biochemistry professor Michael Behe and his cronies in the intelligent design community have attempted to poke holes in evolutionary theory using an idea dubbed "irreducible complexity"—the notion that complex systems with interdependent parts could not have evolved through Darwinian trial and error and must be the work of a creator, since the absence of any single part makes the whole system void. However, a paper published in the April 7th issue of Science provides the first experimental proof that "irreducible complexity" is a misnomer, and that even the most complex systems come into being through Darwinian natural selection.
"We weren't motivated by irreducible complexity," said Joe Thornton, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Oregon and a co-author of the paper. "How complexity evolved is a longstanding issue in evolutionary biology per se, and it's once we saw our results that we realized the implications for the social debate."
Thornton's team has been studying one example of a complex system in which each part defines the function of the other: the partnerships between hormones and the proteins on cell walls, or receptors, that bind them. The researchers looked specifically at the hormone aldosterone, which controls behavior and kidney function, and its receptor.
"[This pairing] is a great model for the problem of the evolution of complexity," said Thornton. "How do these multi-part systems—where the function of one part depends on the other part—evolve?"
Thornton and his co-investigators used computational methods to deduce the gene structure of a long-gone ancestor of aldosterone's receptor. They then synthesized the receptor in the lab. After recovering the ancient receptor—which they estimate to be a 450-million-year-old receptor that would have been present in the ancestor of all jawed vertebrates—Thornton's team tested modern day hormones that would activate it. Although aldosterone did not evolve until many millions of years after the extinction of the ancient hormone receptor, Thornton found that it and the ancient receptor were compatible.
This cross-generational partnership is made possible, Thornton explained, by the similarity in form between aldosterone and the ancient hormone that once partnered with the receptor.
"The story is basically that a new hormone evolved later and exploited a receptor that had a different function previously to take part in a new partnership," said Thornton.
The principal at work in the evolution of complex systems is molecular exploitation: when an individual component casts around for other materials that might work together with it, even though those elements might have evolved as parts of other systems.
"Evolution assembles these complex systems by exploiting parts that are already present for other purposes, drawing them into new complexes and giving them new functions through very subtle changes in their sequences and in their structures," Thornton said.
While the mutually dependent parts do not evolve to be perfectly complementary to one another, after molecular exploitation, they cleave together and create an illusion of irreducible complexity.
"Such studies solidly refute all parts of the intelligent design argument," wrote Christoph Adami, of the Keck Graduate Institute of Applied Life Sciences, in an introduction to the Science paper. "Those 'alternate' ideas, unlike the hypotheses investigated in these papers, remain thoroughly untested. Consequently, whatever debate remains must be characterized as purely political."
That is total and complete bull, and you don't know what you're talking about.
I do quantum chemistry. There are multiple competing programs in the field, and people are constantly checking and measuring them against each other, as well as against experiment. The same is true for bioinformatics.
I urge everyone who has an interest in these types of issues to read this editorial. The author, Dr. Richard Lindzen, is a professor at MIT. Note especially the climate of fear that has been created by "objective" scientists against any scientist who dares question the same set of data and see a different rubric. How funding is withheld from those who see data differently. How academic promotions are withheld. In short, how everyone in an entire department can end up believing the same thing and advocating the same thing - even if it is not proven or simply not true. And yet at the same time, they can do all this under the guise of "science". It is a way to stifle all dissent and independent thought. And it happens every day in most fields of endeavor.
It's paranoid nonsense. Sorry, an MIT prof. can be a paranoid nutter just like anyone else.
Don't think for a moment that everything described by Dr. Lindzen doesn't equally apply to those humans who work with biological data and devote themselves to proving evolution.
No one in biology is concerned much with 'proving' evolution. That's a done deal. But if you doubt their work, by all means get the same data they have - it's all publicly available on the National Library of Medicine database, write a program - none of the algorithms are particularly mathematically sophisticated - and run it yourself. You said you write software. It should be a piece of cake.
Noam Chomsky comes to mind.
Darn. How'd I miss him? :-)
Of course, any experiment "in a lab" must be designed by scientists -- who are intelligent agents -- which means all lab experiments necessarily demonstrate intelligent design. Thus, "macro-evolution" is false because it cannot be replicated in a lab, and if it is replicated in a lab, its still false because lab experiments can only prove intelligent design.
Perhaps you could provide a few examples of something "designed" and something "not designed", and explain how you reached your conclusion.
rwp,
thanks for responding - even though we disagree.
I know it's not bull. It is human. I doubt, for example anyone has gotten inside this "program" to examine it's presuppositions since the article was just published so recently.
If you have not taken time to at least read the article I cited, how can you possibly know what it says? You are revealing, I think, a less than objective bias yourself by jumping so quickly to discounting what he wrote. Did you read the essay?
Actually, I did not write that I am a programmer. That was someone else on the thread.
I maintain what I wrote. The history of science is that many major shifts in view come from outside the field of study because of the groupthink inside a discipline that renders them crippled (often) when it comes to examining their own beliefs in the mirror.
best to you,
ampu
That would explain the Copernican revolution, which was not, as commonly believed, brought about by people who studied astronomy, but by telephone sanitizers.
Same with quantum theory, which was rejected for centuries by the ensconced physics establishment, and only came to our attention through the valiant efforts of outsiders like Velikovsky.
I enjoy the humor. I stand by the history of idea shifts. And sometimes it's one person who stands against his discipline. sometimes for decades before his idea, which was ridiculed, is now accepted as proven. He is an outsider, even while working to prove an idea.
Since you stand by your claim you will no doubt provide examples.
The most drastic revolutions in worldview are the Copernicn revolution, evolution, general relativity and quantum theory. All were accomplished by respected insiders.
There are lots of discoveries, such as genetics, that were ignored, but I don't think this demonstrates your assertion of a trend.
At any rate, any challenge to evolution would require a competing theory with explanatory and predictive power, and there is no such alternative.
And typically bitter or foul smelling. Mammal herbivores avoid eating such plants.
Except for the one mammal that has learned to manipulate them.
When used for food, humans learned to harvest the plants when their alkaloid content was lowest: cucumber, bell pepper, and tomato; or to cook them to neutralize the bitter taste: mustard & spinach green, cabbage, etc.
Caffeine, nicotine, cocaine, ephedrine, codeine, and morphine require considerably more processing and are not consumed for the food value, but for it's pharmaceutical effects.
The interesting thing is that a species of caterpillar has evolved that is not harmed by those alkaloids, so it eats milkweed exclusively.
The Monarch butterfly.
And then there's Manduca sexta (tobacco hornworn), a moth that can become "addicted" to the leaves of the nightshade family (tobacco, eggplant, potato or tomato).
The larvae can feed and develop normally on just about any plant, and will readily switch to other types of leaves. But if it hatches and begins eating the leaves of a nightshade, it'll starve to death before it'll eat leaves from another plant.
nature is amazing without doubt..as for opium being a poisonous alkaloid to insects, not so sure opium has any effect on insects.
Absolutely! And all the while, these people patiently gather more and more hard physical evidence supporting their idea until this mountain of evidence can no longer be denied.
Alas, ID has no such evidence. They must resort to attempting affirmative-action style lawsuits to get their poor pitiful little idea presented as a viable theory in schools.
blowfish,
thanks for your comment. My point is not to argue for ID - since I'm not an ID person. My point was to argue that scientists are just as human as anyone else - and subject to poor thinking. I was surprised that not a single person read and commented on Dr. Lindzen's article in today's WSJ. But none of us like to examine things that point to our faults - myself included.
ampu
By "reverse engineered" do you mean capable of disassembly and subject to comprehension? In other words, a surgeon is capable of disassembling a knee joint, and comprehending its components and its method of function. So is the knee joint something that can be "reverse engineered"?
If so, are you saying that everything that can be disassembled and comprehended (including, but obviously not limited to, a knee joint) is necessarily the product of deliberate design?
js,
thanks for responding.
The history of ideas, which interests me greatly, demonstrates just what I wrote. An example would be Helicobacter pylori.
I bear no anomosity toward you, but I hold no thought that an extensive discussion with you would yield fruit for either of us.
I wish you the best,
ampu
Funny how those things always go.
There are insects that attack opium poppies, for sure. Just like the Monarch butterfly that has evolved to be able to eat poisonous milkweed, no doubt some insects have evolved to be able to eat opium poppy plants.
That doesn't obviate the origins of opium, however. It rather affirms evolutionary theory, since animals have evolved to be able to ingest this poison.
An interesting note here: The Monarch butterfly's caterpillars, through eating the milkweed plant become very bitter tasting to birds. A young bird will try to eat one of these, then gag violently. It will never even touch that caterpillar again. So, evolving a tolerance for the alkaloids in milkweed also turns out to protect these caterpillars from predation. The effect continues on to the adult.
Here's another interesting note: Another butterfly looks very similar to the Monarch. It is also avoided by predatory birds, even though it doesn't ever ingest the milkweed.
Again, evolution is an amazing thing.
Reconstucting ancestral genes is a standard procedure. As I said, we did it as a class project in a freshman course in the chemical basis of evolution.
Very simple example: let's say you four living organisms have, for a protein fragment, amino acid sequences as follows
glsdgewqlv glsdgewqmv vlsegewqlv vltdaewhlv
Well, in third position in the chain, three organisms have an s and the last has a t, so the chances are the common ancestor was s, and we had a single mutation in the ancestral line of organism 4 to give a t. In the fourth position, three have a d and one has an e, so it's most likely the common ancestor had a d. In the fifth position, the common ancestor probably had a g, in the eighth position a q, and the ninth position an l. The first postion is evenly divided, so we can't tell, based on this data (based on a bigger data set, it's almost certainly a g). So the sequence for the common ancestor was likely:
[g/v]lsdgewqlv
Now for a short strand of protein and a few organisms, the probabilities are not definitive, but when you do it for hundreds of species, you can get the common ancestor sequence with very high probability of being correct, as well as the family tree. In the above example, for example, you can tell organisms 1 and 2 share a common ancestor, as do 3 and 4. In fact, the four organisms are the house mouse, the brown rat, the sperm whale, and the finback whale, and the protein is myoglobin.
What is new in the study is not the fact they deduced the common ancestor, it's that they made and expressed the gene. I've always thought this had incredible potential for studying the metabolism of organisms that became extinct millions of year ago.
Science is not a foible-driven kuhn-ian knitting circle, nose-in-the-air critiques by non-scientists to the contrary notwithstanding. Science is the most powerful intellectual solvent ever known because it formalizes, and raises to a high art, filtering out individual conceits and errors through peer-reviewed publication, followed by field verification by a largely critical and resistant audience. Inumerable feeble critiques of science based on pop psychology have come and gone for centuries, science remains, because, at the end of the day, science pays intellectually and tangibly profitable dividends and pop psychology pays lip service. And this "outsider" theory of science isn't significantly borne out by experience. Ideas matter when they pass muster in the scientific obstacle course, not when some knight on a white horse comes thundering in with a spanking new idea.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.